The invention relates to systems for collecting and transmitting medical and health-related data over a network.
The healthcare industry is the largest sector of this nation's economy, comprising over one trillion dollars, or roughly 13% of the gross domestic product (GDP). Because of increasing healthcare costs, it is desirable to reduce overhead, free hospitals beds, and increase compliance with treatment. Remote medical data monitoring devices are directed precisely at those goals.
Accordingly, advances in healthcare and medical devices are increasingly required to meets the needs of an aging population. For example, medical industry experts predict that the demand for medical data monitoring systems will drastically increase over the next decade. Existing monitoring systems, however, fall short of satisfying customers' needs in several ways.
Some remote monitoring systems have been designed to allow patients to transmit their medical data from their homes. An example of one such monitoring system provides a measuring device, such as a blood sugar monitor, which a patient uses to measure a physiological attribute. The patient then enters the measurements taken by the device into the monitoring system, which transmits the data over phone lines or the Internet. Obvious drawbacks of this system are reliability of data and ease of use. Due to human error, users will sometimes enter incorrect data. Because it is not connected to the measuring device, the monitoring system is incapable of detecting or correcting the error, and the database is therefore corrupted. Further, it is inconvenient, and perhaps difficult for some users, to manually enter data. Other existing devices are inadequate because they are not easily expanded, cannot work with multiple users or devices, or are encumbered by physical wire connections.